Will auto recalls lead to safer cars on the road?

What you need to know if your car is recalled

With the world’s two largest car makers admitting to blatant neglect toward consumer welfare and stepping up vehicle recalls based on safety concerns, the rest of the car industry is scrambling to do so, too.

Toyota Motor Corp.
TM, -0.77%
and General Motors Corp.
GM, -0.52%
have put auto-safety recalls front and center since February amid disclosures that their failure to report and repair faulty equipment led to multiple deaths and injuries.

The result is a rash of recalls, putting 2014 on the road to tally record numbers of safety-related recalls in a single year and leaving consumers wondering what to do and what’s next.

“Competitors of GM and Toyota are saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ and are more careful and sensitive to conducting recalls today,” says Allan Kam, director of Highway Traffic Safety Associates and a former senior enforcement attorney for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The upshot is a game-changer for the industry but a far more monumental win for consumers, whose lives will hopefully be considered ahead of corporate cost-saving and circumventing rules and regulations.

“The criteria for recalls used to be compliance with laws or whether there are technical problems,” Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corp., told reporters at a news conference of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association in March. “Now, I think it has become whether the products can assure customers peace of mind.”

His comments came a day after his company agreed to pay a record $1.2 billion fine to U.S. regulators to settle a criminal investigation into unintended acceleration tied to defective floor mats and so-called “sticky pedals” that wouldn’t let up. The carmaker admitted it first intentionally concealed the problems and later misled the public into believing they had been resolved.

The problems were linked to 37 deaths worldwide — including a widely publicized San Diego, Calif., accident that killed a family of four in August 2009. A 911-emergency call was made from a Lexus ES350, which was careening past 100 miles per hour with a stuck accelerator and no brakes. The recorded call ended with the devastating sounds of a crash that killed everyone in the car.

In February, GM disclosed that 2.6 million small cars built from 2003 to 2011 had faulty ignition switches that led to 13 deaths. The ignitions would unexpectedly switch to accessory mode and shut off the engines, which then disabled the airbags and the power steering.

Since then, GM has issued 29 other recalls of 15.8 million cars and trucks — the most recalls in that short a time in the company’s 100-year history and far more than the rest of the industry combined. It also has surpassed the 10.4 million record recalls GM set in 2004, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Last week, GM Chief Executive Mary Barra said she was “deeply saddened and disturbed” by a scathing 315-page report of a probe into the faulty ignition switch. She told employees that GM betrayed its customers when it took 11 years to recall cars equipped with the switches, which she said represented “a pattern of management deficiencies and misjudgments — often based on incomplete data — that were passed off at the time as business as usual.”

That will change, she said. “Our customers have to know they can count on our cars, our trucks and our word,” she said.

Vehicles on the road today are unquestionably and measurably safer than they were 20, 10, even five years ago. “Vehicles have never been safer,” says Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, thanks to advances in auto technology and years of safety oversight. Rader notes that “even if recalls are up, that doesn’t mean cars are less safe.”

Now is as good a time as any for car manufacturers to take stock of complaints and warranty claims on hand. Ford, Chrysler, Nissan and a handful of smaller carmakers also have announced large recalls in recent weeks.

But this is all only a win for consumers if they take action to make sure their cars are safe. “A certain amount of manufacturers are saying there is so much white noise around recalls right now, it’s time to get out in front of anything,” says Karl Brauer, senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book. “When you’ve got this much noise in the automotive-consumer area about recalls, they’re going to start blurring together in people’s mind and no one’s going to be really fazed.”

And the noise isn’t over yet, according to Barclays Capital analyst Brian Johnson. GM is “mining data” on potential safety problems from a variety of sources, including customer and dealership complaints as well as warranty claims. That will take time, Johnson notes in a research report, adding that “recall announcements may continue into mid-summer.”

There’s no question it’s an inconvenience if your car is recalled, but manufacturers encourage you to bring it to a dealer — at no cost to you.

Here’s what you need to know about recalls:

*Vehicle and equipment manufacturers are required to report potential safety defects and foreign safety recalls or other safety campaigns to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Failure to do so leads to high civil penalties and even heftier criminal penalties.

*Not all defects are safety-related. Some could be as simple as the vehicle’s paint fades quickly.

* Even if your vehicle fits the recall model and year of a safety recall, it may not be called back. Sometimes the problems are environmental. For example, tires can fail for a number of reasons that could include salt on the road, which is normal during Midwestern winters but not likely in the South.

*Beliefs change over time. If safety bags don’t inflate in a car crash, it’s presumed the bags are at fault. As more data comes in, it may become apparent that it wasn’t the bags that were the issue, but that the engines went down. The next step in the investigation would be to determine how the engines died.

*If you think your car has a problem that might be recall-worthy, file a complaint with the NHTSA at safercar.gov. NHTSA compiles a massive database of vehicle owner complaints and crosses them with other complaints to find trends of safety-related defects that will warrant investigations.

*If you’re worried that you may have missed a recall, go to your manufacturer’s website or to Edmunds.com and search under car recalls. You also could call your dealer or check at NHTSA.gov under recalls and defects.

Mortgage Rates

Powered by

This advertisement is provided by Bankrate, which compiles rate data from more than 4,800 financial institutions. Bankrate is paid by financial institutions whenever users click on display advertisements or on rate table listings enhanced with features like logos, navigation links, and toll free numbers. Dow Jones receives a share of these revenues when users click on a paid placement.

Intraday Data provided by SIX Financial Information and subject to terms of use. Historical and current end-of-day data provided by SIX Financial Information. All quotes are in local exchange time. Real-time last sale data for U.S. stock quotes reflect trades reported through Nasdaq only. Intraday data delayed at least 15 minutes or per exchange requirements.